Main Menu

Featured Posts

Since the invention of the rules of storytelling, the established formula for a satisfying tale is the three-act structure: beginning, middle and end. It’s no surprise then that the template for a complete series of movies is that of the three-parter. It’s been done time and time again yet usually…

Montage is one of the main (if not the one) traits of film form. It a tool that has puzzled filmmakers from Edwin S. Porter to Joshua Oppenheimer, and it is because montages enable them to structure time and space in forms that, while different from reality, express a deeper…

“Nicolas Roeg is a chillingly chic director.” – Pauline Kael Born in 1928, polymath filmmaker Nicolas Roeg – who turns 90 on August 18th of this year – began his cinematic career as a camera operator (early credits include Ken Hughes’s The Trials of Oscar Wilde [1960] and 2nd unit…

When most people think of “BDSM”, they might immediately have an idea in mind about what it means. In the world of film, however, BDSM isn’t all whips and chains. Relationships can be depicted in different ways that are not heteronormative, often to great results. Before the recent popularizing of…

One of the great tricks of cinema is making the impossible seem not only possible, but effortless and incidental, “as if by magic.” Little do we know, as average movie goers, what great toils and sacrifices go into the production of a given film. Whether it’s a big-budget adventure film…

If it wasn’t for Roger Corman, the Pope of pop cinema, the undisputed king of the B-movie, and one of the most prolific producers of all time, we may have never seen the work of many of the greatest filmmakers/actors ever. Who? You ask. Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, James Cameron, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdanovich, Curtis… Read more »

The post-WWII Japanese film industry has seen a slew of genres and massive changes throughout the decades from the new wave movement to the vitality of digital filmmaking devices reinventing the economic and cinematic approach therefore the studio systems and financial structure of filmmaking itself. In this time period many styles of “cult” films and genres came about by means… Read more »

It’s a fact. We have more filmmakers than we ever had in history and their numbers would only increase from now on. Film schools become more and more popular as well as the film festivals around the world. Fifty years ago it was very hard to own all the required equipment to create your own good piece of material, let… Read more »

Arguably one of the more under-appreciated roles in cinema is that of the costume designer. Costume designers’ stylistic contributions to the world of film and by extension to our own worlds is undeniable. Their work contributes to constructing the characters we love, enhancing the film’s setting via colour and texture, and in some instances transcends the screen and informs our… Read more »

Home Invasion has long been a sub-genre predominantly installed within the horror category and rightfully so. Home invasion occurs when someone unlawfully gains entry to a private dwelling in order to commit a violation upon the resident. In most instances the perpetrator’s intention is to cause psychical or psychological violence. Through evolution, we have ingrained the image of our home… Read more »

Alongside Dracula and Frankenstein, Universal Pictures’ The Wolf Man stands as one of the more iconic movie monsters in history. While not the first attempt to bring the transformation of man to wolf to the silver screen, The Wolf Man is the quintessential werewolf film, the basis for werewolf films to follow. Outside of the 1941 classic, however, only a… Read more »

Film noir, which had begun in the 1940’s, continued into the 1950’s, although there were obvious changes to the style. Gone were the hard boiled detective stories of Phillip Marlowe and Sam Spade, replaced by more unpredictable, violent figures like Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and stories that emphasized psychological character studies. The stories become more widely varied in terms of… Read more »

There are several factors that can create anticipation leading up to the releases of certain movies. Often, it’s the sequels (and sometimes prequels) to wildly popular films that get people excited, though adaptations of bestselling novels and comic books have been awaited with almost equal degrees of enthusiasm, especially in the last couple of decades. A variety of other contributors… Read more »

Born in Spain and exiled for a majority of his career, Luis Buñuel created a filmography of works that ranged from surreal Parisian shorts to psychosexual Mexican features (and everything in between). His films commonly attacked institutions (religion, society, bourgeois culture) and reconstructed narrative language (often at the expense of spatial/temporal continuity). Buñuel’s direction and style elude finite readings, leading… Read more »

Zombies could easily be classed as movie monsters rivalling the likes of Vampires, Werewolves and Ghosts. Their infiltration into the cinematic playing field has been slow and disjointed, much like the creatures themselves. The golden era of zombie movies was probably the 1980s when a plethora of these movies rose up to greet eager cinema fans, but then they slowly… Read more »

Last weekend the world was given the first blockbuster of the year in Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, but the blockbuster season truly started with the release of Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days Of Future Past. The film marks Singer’s return to the X-Men franchise after an eleven year absence, and although X-Men: First Class and last summer’s The Wolverine was a step… Read more »

Let’s start this list with a disclaimer. The term “essential” in the title of this article applies only to those who are into Takashi Miike’s films and know what they might be in for. For all those who aren’t familiar with the works of the extremely prolific Japanese director yet, it will be very touch-and-go as plenty of his work… Read more »

With the 67th Cannes Film Festival coming to a close – the three-hour Turkish drama Winter Sleep directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the Palme d’Or as Bennett Miller, Julianne Moore, Timothy Spall and others earned top honors – we wanted to cap off the ceremony by looking at 25 of the best films that have won the Palme d’Or… Read more »

Although debatable, many attribute the 1915 release of D.W. Griffith’s controversial Birth of the Nation as the birth of American cinema (at least the first Hollywood film). This means we will soon be celebrating the centennial of the biggest industry in film. In the hundred years that Hollywood has been making films, certain years have stood out in terms of… Read more »

The Japanese New Wave or ‘Nuberu Bagu’ was a film movement that occurred in Japan from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s and completely changed the way the world previously saw Japanese cinema. The world of “academia” usually prescribes Japan’s golden age of cinema to that of the 1930s to 1950s. From the period pieces of Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira… Read more »

Sometimes, even the most hardened cinephiles can enjoy a mainstream comedy, even if it’s not quite in the same league as what they’re used to. Speaking as a cinephile myself who despises most mainstream American comedy a la Adam Sandler and Tyler Perry, I’ve attempted to round up some of the higher quality mainstream comedies that are quite good and… Read more »